In Brief
The Chase House at Strawbery Banke Museum in Portsmouth, New Hampshire is shown as an 1818 merchant's home. But staff and tour accounts keep describing a pale young girl who runs the second-floor hall and vanishes, and the museum doesn't tell you the house was once an orphanage.
The Full Story
The Chase House at Strawbery Banke Museum in Portsmouth, New Hampshire is one of the grandest Georgian homes on the campus, and visitors keep describing the same girl inside it. She's thin and pale, in a plain dress, and she runs down the second-floor hallway and is gone before anyone reaches the end of it. When someone gets close, she goes. Tour accounts say she's been heard screaming from a room she used to have. The same accounts add doors that were shut at closing standing open in the morning, lights and ceiling fans cycling on their own, which maintenance puts down to old wiring.
The museum doesn't market the place as haunted. It interprets the building to the year 1818, furnished from the inventory taken at merchant Stephen Chase's death, and the costumed history it tells is the prosperous-household one. The girl belongs to a chapter that interpretation leaves out.
The house was built around 1762, and the Chase family lived in it for over a century. Then it stopped being a home. Stephen Chase's grandson gave the building over to orphaned children, and from the early 1880s until World War I the grand Georgian house was the Chase Home for Children, an orphanage for kids under fourteen. It moved to a larger site in 1916, where the organization still runs as a youth home today, one of the oldest non-profits in the state.
What happened inside in between is mostly undocumented, except for one stretch that made the newspaper. In August 1893 there were nine cases of diphtheria at the orphanage. A girl with the last name Carr died on the 24th, per a Boston Globe article that ran the same day. No source names the rest of the sick children, and no record gives the full count of who died there over the orphanage's run.
A widespread version of the legend holds that a girl hanged herself in the building. Researchers who went looking found no documentation for it anywhere; it survives on the ghost-tour circuit and nowhere in the record. The girl people report is never named in any account.
The museum dresses the house as a merchant's home and runs a family Halloween program it's careful not to confuse with a real haunting. The girl in the plain dress keeps running the hallway anyway, from the part of the building's life the tour doesn't mention.
